Given the state of college recruiting today, your chances of
interacting with companies on campus are slim - unless your campus
is a top school. It’s not fair, and it sucks, but that's the way it
is. But does it have to be? Does where you went to school really
affect your performance in technical interviews? Turns out: it
doesn't.

interviewing.io is a platform where engineers practice technical
interviewing anonymously. If things go well, they can unlock the
ability to participate in real, but still anonymous, interviews
with top companies like Twitch, Lyft and more.

Earlier this year, we launched an offering specifically for
university students. It was intended to help level the playing
field right at the start of people’s careers.

The problem

Here’s the sad truth: given the state of college recruiting
today, if you haven’t attended one of a very few top schools, your
chances of interacting with companies on campus are slim. It’s not
fair, and it sucks, but university recruiting is still dominated by
career fairs. Companies pragmatically choose to visit the same few
schools every year. Despite the fact that the career fair is one of
the most antiquated, biased forms of recruiting that there is, the
format persists. This is likely because there doesn’t seem to be a
better way to quickly connect with students at scale.

In a previous blog post, we explained why companies should stop
courting students from the same five schools.

Regardless of how important you think this idea is (for
altruistic reasons, perhaps), you may still be skeptical about the
value and practicality of broadening the college recruiting effort.
You probably concede that it’s rational to visit top schools, given
limited resources. Society is often willing to agree that there are
perfectly qualified students coming out of non-top colleges, but
they maintain that they’re relatively rare.

We’re here to show you, with some nifty data from our university
platform, that this is simply not true.

To be fair, this isn’t the first time we’ve looked at whether
where you went to school matters. In a previous post, we found that
taking Udacity and Coursera programming classes mattered way more
than where you went to school. And way back in the day, one of our
founders figured out that where you went to school didn’t matter at
all — but that the number of typos and grammatical errors on your
resume did.

So, what’s different this time? The big, exciting difference is
that these prior analyses were focused mostly on engineers who had
been working for at least a few years already. This made it
possible to argue that a few years of work experience smoothes out
any performance disparity that comes from having attended (or not
attended) a top school.

In fact, the good people at Google found that while GPA didn’t
really matter after a few years of work, it did matter for college
students. So, we wanted to face this question head-on and look
specifically at college juniors and seniors while they were still
in school. Even more pragmatically, we wanted to see if companies
limiting their hiring efforts to just top schools were getting
higher caliber candidates.

Before delving into the numbers, here’s a quick rundown of how
our university platform works and what kind of data we collect.

The setup

For students who want to practice on interviewing.io, the first
step is a brief (~15-minute) coding assessment on Qualified to test
basic programming competency. Students who pass this assessment
(that is, those who are ready to code while another human being
breathes down their necks) get to start booking practice
interviews.

When an interviewer and an interviewee match on our platform,
they meet in a collaborative coding environment with voice, text
chat, and a whiteboard and jump right into a technical question.
Interview questions on the platform tend to fall into the category
of what you’d encounter during a phone screen for a back-end
software engineering role. Interviewers typically come from top
companies like Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Airbnb, and more.

After every interview, interviewers rate interviewees in a few
different categories, including technical ability. Technical
ability gets rated on a scale of 1 to 4, where 1 is “poor” and 4 is
“amazing!” On our platform, a score of 3 or above has generally
meant that the person was skilled enough to move forward.

On our platform, we’re fortunate to have thousands of students
from all over the U.S., spanning over 200 universities. We thought
this presented a unique opportunity to look at the relationship
between school tier and interview performance for both juniors
(interns) and seniors (new grads).

To study this relationship, we first split schools into the
following four tiers, based on rankings from U.S. News & World
Report:

Then, we ran some statistical significance testing on interview
scores vs. school tier to see if school tier mattered for both
interns (college juniors) and new grads (college seniors). Our
sample comprised a set of roughly 1,000 students.

Does school have anything to do with interview performance?

In the graphs below, you can see technical score distributions
for interviews with students in each of the four school tiers (see
legend). As you recall from above, each interview is scored on a
scale of 1 to 4, where 1 is the worst and 4 is the best.

What’s pretty startling is that the shape of these
distributions, for both juniors and seniors, is remarkably similar.
Indeed, statistical significance testing revealed no difference
between students of any tier when it came to interview
performance.

Just to note: of course, this hinges on everyone completing a
quick 15-minute coding challenge first, to ensure they’re ready for
synchronous technical interviews. We’re excited about this because
companies can replicate this step in their process as well!

What this means is that top-tier students are achieving the same
results as those in “no-name” schools. So the question becomes: if
the students are comparable in skill, why are companies spending
egregious amounts of money attracting only a subset of them?

Okay, so what are companies missing?

Besides missing out on great, cheaper-to-acquire future
employees, companies are missing out on an opportunity to save time
and money. Right now, a ridiculous amount of money is being spent
on university recruiting. We’ve previously cited the $18k price tag
just for entry to the MIT career fair. In a study done by Lauren
Rivera through the Harvard Business Review, she reveals that one
firm budgeted nearly 1 million dollars just for social recruiting
events on a single campus.

The higher price tag of these events also means that it makes
even less sense for smaller companies or startups to try and
compete with high-profile, high-profit tech giants. Most of the top
schools that are being heavily pursued already have enough
recruiters vying for their students. Unwittingly, this pursuit
seems to run contrary to most companies’ desire for high diversity
and long-term sustainable growth.

Even when companies do believe that talent is evenly distributed
across school tiers, there are still reasons why companies might
recruit at top schools. There are other factors that help elevate
certain schools in a recruiter’s mind. There are long-standing
company-school relationships (for example, the number of alumni who
work at the company currently). There are signaling effects,
too — companies get Silicon Valley bonus points by saying their eng
team is comprised of a bunch of ex-Stanford, ex-MIT ex-and so on
students.

A quick word about selection bias

Since this post appeared on Hacker News, there’s been some loud,
legitimate discussion about how the pool of students on
interviewing.io may not be representative of the population at
large. Indeed we do have a self-selected pool of students who
decided to practice interviewing.

Certainly, all the blog posts we publish are subject to this
(very valid) line of criticism, as is this post in particular.

As such, selection bias in our user pool might mean that 1)
we’re getting only the worst students from top schools (because,
presumably, the best ones don’t need the practice), or 2) we’re
getting only the best/most motivated students from non-top
schools — or both.

Any subset of these results is entirely possible, but there are
few reasons why we believe that what we’ve published here might
hold truth regardless.

First of all, in our experience, regardless of their background
or pedigree, everyone is scared of technical interviewing. Case in
point: before we started working on interviewing.io, we didn’t
really have a product yet. So before investing a lot of time and
heartache into this questionable undertaking, we wanted to test the
waters to see if interview practice was something engineers really
wanted — and more so, who these engineers that wanted practice
were.

So, we put up a pretty mediocre landing page on Hacker News…and
got something like 7,000 signups on the first day. Of these 7,000
signups, roughly 25% were senior (4+ years of experience) engineers
from companies like Google and Facebook. Now, this isn’t to say
that they’re necessarily the best engineers out there, but it does
suggest that the engineers the market seems to value the most still
needed our services.

Another data point comes from one of our founders. Every year,
Aline does a guest lecture on job search preparedness for a
technical communication course at MIT. This course is one way to
fulfill the computer science major communication requirement, so
enrollment tends to span the gamut of computer science students.
Before every lecture, she sends out a survey asking students what
their biggest pain points are in preparing for their job search.
Every year, trepidation about technical interviewing is either at
the top of the list of 2nd from the top.

And though this doesn’t directly address the issue of whether
we’re only getting the “best of the worst or the worst of the best”
(and I hope the above has convinced you there’s more to it than
that), here’s the distribution of school tiers among our users. I
expect it mirrors the kinds of distributions companies see in their
student applicant pool as well:

So what can companies do?

Companies may never stop recruiting at top-tier schools
entirely. But they ought to at least include schools outside of
that very small circle in the search for future employees.

The end result of the data is the same: for good engineers, the
school they attended means a lot less than we think. The time and
money that companies spend to compete for candidates within the
same select few schools would be better spent creating
opportunities that include everyone. They could also develop tools
to vet students more fairly and efficiently.

As you saw above, we used a 15-minute coding assessment to cull
our inbound student flow, and just a short challenge leveled the
playing field between students from all walks of life. At the very
least, we’d recommend employers do the same thing in their process.
But, of course, we’d be remiss if we didn’t suggest one other
thing.

At interviewing.io, we’ve proudly built a platform that grants
the best-performing students access to top employers, no matter
where they went to school or where they come from. Our university
program, in particular, allows us to grant companies the privilege
to reach an exponentially larger pool of students, for the same
cost of attending one or two career fairs at top target
schools.

Want diverse, top talent without the chase? Sign up to be an
employer on our university platform!

About the Podcast

The official podcast of the freeCodeCamp open source community.
Learn to code with free online courses, programming projects, and interview preparation for developer jobs.